produced by Archives & Museum Informatics

site at http://www.archimuse.com/mw2009/

Out There: Museums and User Generated Content on Social Media Sites

Abstract

This workshop focuses on using social media sites to set
tasks related to museum content or to support user generated activities. At the
V&A the social networking sites are managed by the marketing department
whilst social media sites, which draw people together over common interests,
are used by the Web team and education to develop activities related to our
collections. The aim of this workshop is to share ideas and experience and for
people to go away with ideas for using social media sites to develop their own
online projects.

Introduction

This is not a conventional conference paper because it
accompanies a workshop. The purpose of the workshop is to develop and share
ideas, so this short paper is more an introduction to what we might cover and a
request for contributions. I would be grateful if workshop members could send
me examples of any Web 2 activities about their museum collections that they
have set up on other people’s sites or ways in which they have used other sites
to support their activities. Also, I am interested in activities based on the
use of postcards. My e-mail address is g.durbin @ vam.ac.uk .

I will come to the event with examples of tasks we have set
up on our own site and others. In particular, I will document how we have used
other sites to support a participative site on Wedding dresses 1840 to the
present. The aim of the workshop is that participants should go away with ideas
for using social media sites to develop their own on-line projects.

Despite having worked with user-generated content for more
years that the term Web 2.0 has been about, I have only recently grasped some
important distinctions between different types of Web activity. We have been
working with a company called Fresh Networks to create a strategy for social
media. One of the most useful distinctions is that between social networking
and social media. Fresh Networks describes social networking as the ‘I’ sites.
Facebook, MySpace and Twitter, for example, are all about the individual
account holders who talk about their activities, their friends, their
photographs, and their lifestyle. Social media sites such as Flickr, Creative
Spaces, Ravalry are the ‘us’ sites where individuals cluster together because
of shared interests in content.

Understanding this distinction has clarified roles in our
museum. The marketing department deals with social networking sites so that
they can be part of decisions about lifestyle choices. The Web team and
education instead focus on social media site where we can make links to our
content. We pick the sites that fit most appropriately with our current
projects and we may choose to build a social media site for ourselves if what
is out there does not fit with our needs.

By the time of the conference I hope to have some examples
of people interacting with V&A objects and themes on a new social media
site called Creative Spaces. Early in 2009 we will be launching Creative Spaces
with our partners in the National Museums Online Learning Project (NMOLP). [The
National Online Learning Project is funded by the Treasury under their Invest
to Save scheme and is a partnership between the Victoria and Albert Museum as
lead partner and the Natural History Museum, The British Museum, Sir John
Soane’s Museum, Tate, The Wallace Collection the Imperial War Museum, the Royal
Armouries and the National Portrait Gallery.]

On this site people can share their ideas on how to use our
collections. They can create notebooks, which can be public or private and use
them as a place to write, save text from our databases, and place images and
video. There is the facility for searching across the object databases of the
nine museums. Users can also form groups with others with similar interests.

We hope this site will become a hub for creative activity
inspired by museum collections. At the V&A we plan to experiment to see if
there are people who may not upload their own material to our user generated
sites but who would want to discuss the issues. Perhaps people did not go out
and create a work of art for the World Beach Project, but would like to discuss
that project. Maybe they do not want to contribute a photograph of a wedding
dress to our site, but have observed something they would like to share about
the subject. Up to now many of our activities have asked for a visual response
because we deal in the visual and also because visual responses are quicker to
moderate. We are about to find out whether discussion is wanted in addition who
it will attract and what it might add.

In preparation for this workshop, participants may like to
look at some of the following sites if they are not already familiar with them.
I hope we can add examples to this list in the course of the workshop.